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What an incredible story Peter Richardson has told! Ramparts magazine turned the Sixties on its head with a high-octane combination of avant-garde satire and gumshoe investigative reporting. A Bomb in Every Issue is an excellent history that shouldn't be ignored. I can't recommend it enough.--DOUGLAS BRINKLEY, AUTHOR OF THE WILDERNESS WARRIOR

A Bomb in Every Issue tells the largely untold story of the wild ride of this hugely influential magazine that achieved countless firsts: it published the first conspiracy theory about JFK's assassination, it was the first to reveal that the CIA had backed the National Student Association during the Cold War, and its article about the use of napalm on Vietnamese children (another first) caused Martin Luther King Jr. to speak out against the war for the first time.

Launched in 1962 as an intellectual Catholic quarterly, within five years Ramparts had become a secular magazine and won a George Polk Award for "its explosive revival of the great muckraking tradition." Deeply committed to the civil rights and antiwar movements, its contributors included Noam Chomsky, César Chávez, Seymour Hersh, Angela Davis, and Susan Sontag. It was in its pages that Che Guevara's diaries and the prison diaries of Eldridge Cleaver (which became Soul on Ice) first appeared. Although by 1975, out of money and time, it had folded for good, Ramparts left an important journalistic legacy, influencing a generation of reporters and editors that is still apparent today.

Editorial Reviews

Review

Short, explosive, unforgotten: the story of Ramparts magazine and its lingering influence long after it was gone.”—L.A. Times

Peter Richardson . . . charts the publications’ high points with a gleam in his eye.”—New York Times

From the Publisher

The rollicking story of Ramparts--the magazine that captured the zeitgeist of the '60s, repeatedly scooped the New York Times, brought the new left into American living rooms, and made an indelible imprint on American journalism

Advance Praise:"Peter Richardson has done a brilliant job bringing to life the incredible story of Ramparts, a publication that changed journalism and the world it reported on. This book will become required reading for all those concerned about the current crisis in the world of news. A Bomb in Every Issue makes clear that Ramparts in its prime was a vortex of flamboyance and critical intelligence. Out of that maelstrom came reporting that truly changed America. What makes this book even better is that it has not ignored or downplayed the foibles of Ramparts' founders and chief architects. It is a cautionary tale told with economy that will be a touchstone for the new journalism, the new Ramparts of the twenty-first century." --Lowell Bergman, professor of journalism, University of California, Berkeley, and a correspondent for PBS's Frontline

"It's a great delight to see this key chapter in the history of American journalism at last get the readable, judicious history it deserves. Ramparts touched the lives of far more people than its readers by paving the way for the rich universe of alternative media now open to us. Peter Richardson has told an important story, and told it well." --Adam Hochschild, author of Half the Way Home and Bury the Chains

America's muckraking tradition stretches back to the 1690s--but no publication better represented it than Ramparts. In the 1960s, it helped set a generation on fire, tore away a veil of hypocrisy in public life, and set new standards in editorial and design quality. Richardson's tale brings the dead to life, and gives us a new understanding of how journalism changes the way we are and will be." --Richard Parker, senior fellow, Shorenstein Center on the Press, Politics, and Public Policy, Harvard University

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

Peter Richardson has crafted a work of thorough research and a compelling story in "A Bomb in Every Issue," the saga of Ramparts magazine. Ramparts was the quintessential leftist publication of the 1960s that changed traditional journalism and inspired a generation of investigative reporters before Watergate.

Anyone who lived or is interested in the Sixties and the emergence of the counter-culture will find this to be a fascinating backstory to the era. Richardson draws upon interviews with more than fifty writers, experts and observers of the tumultuous events that shaped much of the political and socioeconomic framework in Northern California, including Jann Wenner, Warren Hinckle, Lowell Bergman, Tom Hayden, Paul Krassner, Adam Hochschild, Robert Scheer and many more.

As a San Francisco Bay Area writer and former newspaper journalist during the late Sixties and Seventies, I thought I had a fair knowledge of the media scene at the time, but I was captivated by details here that I had never read or known of before. I heartily recommend the book.

A Bomb in Every Issue: How the Short, Unruly Life of Ramparts Magazine Changed America is the first book to tell of the short life of Ramparts, originally founded as a Catholic literary quarterly that evolved to become the leftist publication of its times committed to civil rights and antiwar movements. This magazine made a strong impact on its readers and this history is key for any library strong in journalism or social issues.

This fabulous book kept me completely hooked. While some of the information and networks and stories were totally new to me (who knew all that about the Black Panthers?!?!) the more familiar stories helped me to piece together parts of the sixties that I had never thoroughly processed. Pick it up and enjoy!

This relatively short book was a fresh air compared to these 400 and 500 page plus books that seem to be the norm these days. There was a lot of interesting info in this book. I liked the info regarding noted celebrities and politicians; U.S. counterculture in the 60s; the anecdotes about the Ramparts staff; and the stuff regarding the socio-economic changes that rocked the nation back then. I'm sure the writer left a lot of interesting stuff out. But I was born in the mid-80s, so I'm not familiar with that time in the same way other reviewers were, so it didn't bother me as much.

The main complaints I have of this book is the fact that we're given few photos regarding the art in the magazine. Apparently, the artistic layout of the magazine was so stunning other magazines were envious (Esquire was envious enough to try to hire the art director). I would have liked to see a lot of this artwork but the book features too little. Another complaint: there aren't any quotes from the magazine. From what I have read about Ramparts, the writing style was something people truly liked about the magazine. In that case, why aren't there any excerpts of the writing style? That would have truly helped this book.

The magazines we get today like Time or Newsweek although have a history they are largely mainstream. They give us the usual lo-down on what is going on in the world but not much more. Peter Richardson sheds some light on how it used be done with his book about Ramparts magazine A Bomb in Every Issue: How the Short, Unruly Life of Ramparts Magazine Changed America.

Ramparts was founded by Edward M. Keating in 1962 with a focus on catholic matters. I use the phrase "catholic matters" but maybe a description from books introduction might give you a better idea of what Ramparts was about. It described itself as a "forum for the mature American Catholic" focusing on "those positive principles of Hellenic-Christian tradition which have shaped and sustained our civilization for the past two thousand years" It Sounds pretty staunch doesn't it? But it wasn't long before the magazine took a sharp turn to the left; it became a radical muckraker that by all accounts turned the art of journalism on its head and gave it a good shake.

I first heard of Ramparts through Scanlans magazine and their common denominator Warren Hinckle; and because of my huge interest in Scanlans I was delighted to get a peek at A Bomb in Every Issue so soon.

So what about it? Well after reading the book I've realized that magazines like Ramparts and Scanlans for that matter deserve some consideration for their contribution to a new, no nonsense style of journalism and gutsy political reporting. Publications with guile are thin on the ground these days.

Richardson gives a detailed account of the 13 year life of Ramparts and its most contentious stories.Read more ›

Peter Richardson's excellent first book, "American Prophet: The Life and Work of Carey McWilliams," told the story of the most important political writer to come out of 1930s and '40s California into post-war national prominence. Writing that book prepared Richardson well for "A Bomb in Every Issue," his outstanding second effort.

"A Bomb in Every Issue" traces the vivid history of Ramparts magazine, the Bay Area experiment that in little more than a decade (the early '60s through the mid-'70s) evolved from a sober-minded liberal Catholic journal of ideas into one of the most radical, irreverent and influential magazines of its time.

From Thomas Merton to Eldridge Cleaver and the Symbionese Liberation Army, from Vatican II to Vietnam and People's Park, Richardson presents a dazzling cast of characters and a heady range of issues and events. While training his focus on the ground-level California activists who made the Ramparts bomb tick--vanguard journalists, visionary publishers, and at-times downright gonzo promoters--Richardson keeps a steady eye on the larger world of American politics and culture that Ramparts illuminated and affected.

More About the Author

I teach humanities and American studies at San Francisco State University and serve as the book review editor at The National Memo.

I've written about the Grateful Dead, one of the counterculture's most successful and durable institutions; Ramparts magazine, the legendary San Francisco muckraker; and Carey McWilliams, the prolific California author and longtime editor of The Nation magazine. The Grateful Dead history was an Amazon Best Book of the Month, and the Ramparts book was an Editors' Choice at the New York Times and a Top Book of 2009 at Mother Jones. Writing for The Nation, Mike Davis called the McWilliams book a superb biography.

I've served as an editor at the University of California Press, PoliPoint Press, the Public Policy Institute of California, and Harper & Row, Publishers. During my misspent youth, I was an associate professor of English at the University of North Texas.